Thanks to the many readers who responded constructively to my recent columns about union choice, and to those who re-Tweeted it and commented on it on line and on Facebook.

Most of you who took time to contact me directly agree with my main contention that union members need to have more choices than their organizations seem willing to give them these days.

We need a lot more democracy in our supposedly democratic unions, and fewer top-down orders on how to think, vote, and run our communities. The leadership is supposed to work for us, remember? Not the other way ‘round.

Dissenters who disagree with the party line pursued by their unions not only deserve respect for those views, they deserve the kind of legal protection the Progressive Conservative party is proposing in their latest “Pathways To Prosperity: Flexible Labour Markets” white paper.

Maybe some of the Tories’ ideas go too far, maybe not. But at the very least they deserve public debate.

“There is a God. Finally someone with the cajones to ‘take them on,’ ” one reader wrote to me this weekend. “Tough battle ahead as years of socialist thinking are tough to fight. Once again you increase your list of friends on the union side. You will need a body guard during election season.”

I won’t reveal his name, or anyone else’s who has contacted me privately. Union members tell me over and over they are too afraid to say anything critical about their union publicly, and they beg me to keep their names out of the paper.

Over the years I’ve lost count of how many people have told me they’ve seen retribution handed out in their own workplaces by their unions against anyone seen to be “stirring the pot” – which is CAW lingo for deliberately causing unsanctioned trouble.

That kind of retribution should be illegal, but it’s been tolerated for years by governments too frightened themselves of earning the wrath of the powerful political fanatics who run our unions. These people, some of them ruthless, have tens of millions of dollars (MY money, and yours) available to them to change the course of elections.

Readers have also warned me repeatedly over the years that I’m putting my personal safety at risk by writing what I do and angering union leaders the way I do. But so far, thankfully, they have been proven wrong about how far the bullies and thug squads are willing to go in their determination to silence any and all critics inside workplaces represented by organized labour.

“Please keep up the good work,” wrote a regular reader from Essex County who says her husband was often an unhappy union member (not my union, the CAW) for all of his working life. “I love the fact you are not backing down from the union bullies. Enough is enough!”

Of course I heard from my usual gang of haters and hecklers, too – a group which I have come to look upon fondly as my own personal Greek chorus.

If you ever dip into the cesspool of faintly deranged regulars who post under my column on the web (a growing number of people tell me gleefully they love to read “the crazies who comment on your column” for entertainment) you will recognize their names instantly. When they’re mad about a column, that’s all confirmation I need that I hit the mark that day. They hated my last two columns about unions; excellent.

“Anti-union,” this group always shriek at me – as though it’s somehow illegal to have a political viewpoint different than their own. These people have made intolerance of other views a kind of angry religion.

It shouldn’t be necessary to tell these people that I have never written an anti-union sentence for this newspaper in 30 years – even if it is my absolute right to do so if I choose. Sure, I’ve uttered a few anti-union slurs in my time. Who hasn’t, in a town where every aspect of life seems to be touched by organized labour – often to the detriment?

I happen to believe that unions are not only useful entities but very necessary for those who work for governments and large national and international corporations with thousands of employees. We lower-tier employees in such outfits nearly always need legal protection from corner-cutting middle managers willing to trample on others in order to get ahead.

Unions have also been useful defenders and promoters of personal rights and worker freedoms. It’s just a shame that the past tense has to be used in writing that sentence, but it’s necessary given their recent penchant for silencing those they disagree with politically.

I’m not against unions. I’m against stupidity, arrogance, nepotism, corruption, greed, laziness and failure. Unfortunately, too many unions these days, including my own, seem to embrace those shortcomings as their foundational values.

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